The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an 1890 edition that he had turned into a kind of commonplace book with the inclusion of “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books.” Well before finding that reference in Ondaatje’s novel, the Histories was on my never-shrinking list of “books that I intend to read one day.” Researched and written between the 450s and the 420s BCE, the Histories was Herodotus’s account of the conflict between the Greeks and Persians that culminated in the Persian Wars. The difficulty (“excuse” might be a better word) that perpetually prevented me from reading Herodotus lay in my choosing a suitable edition: I would browse the Classics section whenever I was in a good used bookstore without ever finding a copy of the Histories that I just had to have. Publication of The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Pantheon) has solved my problem: I can think of nothing else I’d look for in an edition of this work by “the Father of History” (also known less flatteringly as “the Father of Lies”). Rich with maps, illustrations, explanatory footnotes and scholarly appendixes, The Landmark Herodotus offers a fluid translation by Andrea L. Purvis that gives this ancient text new life.